Iridescence, or sheen that shifts color depending on your viewing angle, is pretty in peacock feathers. But it's been a nuisance for engineers trying to mimic the birds' unique color mechanism to make high-resolution, reflective, ...

Optical communications, or photonics, technology has failed to match the miniaturization of electronic components, mainly because of fundamental laws of classical optics. The smallest photonic devices are limited to sizes ...

(Phys.org)—A team of scientists from Scotland and the Czech Republic has created a real-life "tractor" beam, as featured in the Star Trek movies, which for the first time allows a beam of light to attract objects.

If you want to create a moving light source, you have a few possibilities. One is to mount a light emitter in some kind of mechanical housing—the approach used in, say, theatrical spotlights, which stagehands swivel and ...

(Phys.org)—As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops—powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors—everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, ...

(Phys.org)—A microscale technique known as optical trapping uses beams of light as tweezers to hold and manipulate tiny particles. Stanford researchers have found a new way to trap particles smaller than 10 nanometers - ...

Electrons move extremely rapidly inside atoms and molecules (the order of magnitude is the attosecond, i.e. 10-18 of a second). One way to observe these phenomena is to use isolated ultrashort pulses of light, which are successfully ...

(Phys.org)—Excitement around the potential for targeted nanoparticles (NPs) that can be controlled by stimulus outside of the body for cancer therapy has been growing over the past few years. More specifically, there has ...

By using an ordinary green laser pointer, the kind commonly found in offices and college lecture halls, an Israeli research team has developed a new and highly portable Raman spectrometer that can detect extremely minute ...